For the past few interviews, we have been diligently tweeting away while Krista converses with our guests. We hope that this is a unique way for you to experience some of the highlights — and get the conversation started — before you experience the full edited (or unedited!) show.

After our interview with Mario Livio, we all sat down to discuss what constitutes a good tweet. So, this week, we ask you: seeing the entire tweeting transcript below, what tweets are helpful? Do links help? Is it too much to break information between tweets?

For the next 90 minutes, we’ll be live-tweeting Krista’s ISDN interview with Mario Livio, a Romanian astrophysicist who grew up in Israel.

Mario Livio’s latest book is “Is God a Mathematician?”

Livio asks if mathematics discovered or is it an invention of the human mind. Picks up from Krista’s interview with two Vatican astronomers.

“Mathematics turns out to be too powerful in describing all these things.” -Mario Livio

Mario Livio: Newton takes observations that aren’t so accurate, + his mathematical equations are more accurate than the observations!

Livio: the theory of knots are very important application for string theory even though it was initially thought to have no application.

Livio: The conclusion I reached about math being discovered or invented is that the question is being posed wrong. It’s a mixture.

Ex. of mixture: imaginary numbers like square root of -1. We invent the concept and then we discover the relationships among these concepts.

Ancient Greeks invented concept of prime numbers. And then the discoveries were forced upon us.

Reading the above it's clear to me now that what I only just heard a few minutes ago on the radio was a truncated version of this discussion, a discussion that had me uttering "yes! yes! yes!" emphatically under my breath, with a pretty much constant grin on my face. So I'll be actively seeking out a link to the complete conversation in just a moment. I do think they are important, not just for the potential active listener who will in fact seek them out, or the casual reader who might choose to follow them, but for the tweeter him/herself. I don't know about you but there are times when I feel I just have to communicate something, regardless of whether or not anyone is listening. "Is God really a mathematician for instance, or is he mathematics itself? Does mathematics in and of itself necessitate everything else, much like Spinoza once thought?" I couldn't help but think of that when listening to the discussion of Penrose and his three worlds, after which I was dying to interject, "Krista you've just got to pick up Penrose's 'Road to Reality' and read the sections elaborating on the mysterious interconnections between those three worlds! There's so much more to talk about!

I love following threads, the only suggestion I'd make with respect to providing them by way of links is this: make them either descriptive footnotes, or parts of descriptive footnotes, that way they're more likely to speak to people's interests, to be followed. Over time if you browse the web a fair amount, I think you become pretty jaded with respect to links that don't tell you much. They almost feel like a form of visual noise, leading to what amount to personal dead ends far too often.